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With the experience Mike Ross gained solving complex problems and bringing disparate parties together as a legislator, he now brings to his practice as an attorney where he focuses on real estate, strategic advice, and government relations. Mike served for 14 years as a Boston City Councilor, as well as serving as the President of the body. In 2013 he entered the race for mayor, sharing a bold vision for the city’s future. As an elected official he championed the opening of elementary schools in underserved neighborhoods and recently celebrated the announcement of the opening of a new downtown school - the first since the Carter administration. He brought physical education to area schools and focused on creating innovative job training models. His efforts revitalize the Boston Common and launch Food Trucks by borrowing ideas from other cities, have helped to move Boston forward. Ross represented District 8 on the Boston City Council, including Back Bay, Beacon Hill, Fenway, and Mission Hill and some of Boston's greatest institutions and landmarks: Fenway Park, the Longwood Medical Area and Massachusetts General Hospital, the Museum of Fine Arts and Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and a number of our city's finest academic institutions. World-renowned public spaces like the Boston Common, the Public Garden, the Esplanade, and Frederick Law Olmstead's historic Emerald Necklace are also in the district. Ross spearheaded the effort to turn the Boston Common into America's greatest park. As Chair of the Special Committee on Boston Common, Mike led the effort to bring more activity to the Boston Common, through improved programming efforts, as well as creating a restaurant and other eateries like the ones in a number of New York City's parks to draw tourists and residents alike to the Common. Mike has a long history of utilizing technology to make city government more accessible for residents. Prior to his election to the Council, Mike was part of a team that developed Boston's first Website. The site received the "Best of the Web" award for municipalities by Government Technology Magazine. As Councilor, Mike wrote for Boston magazine's blog, Boston Daily, as well as contributing to Blue Mass Group. He believes that there is a strong role that technology and the internet can play in making government better, more open, and more accessible.

President Bassett has published books on authors such as William Faulkner, Mark Twain, and William Dean Howells, (as well as others.) In a sense, President Bassett believes the taxonomy of "English major" has become less and less descriptive, the term itself denotes study in a wide variety of disciplines. The term "literature" has not held a large position on college campuses until the last hundred years. "English" as a discipline plays the roles now that departments of Theology, or Classics might have played at one time. He believes that a college would be greatly impoverished if literature departments did not remain "central players" in universities. He believes the study of literature can teach us the nature of human experience just as history may teach us the nature of human experience. He believes a realization of this interconnectedness would be a desirable end.

Becky Wai-Ling Packard is interested in the intersection of motivation, identity, and mentoring. Packard's research focuses on the mentoring of women pursuing science and technology careers; the aspirations and mentoring of urban ethnic minority low-income adolescents, especially in science and technology; and understanding complex pathways toward higher education. She has designed mentoring programs in the context of her courses featuring partnerships between Mount Holyoke students and area youth from nearby Holyoke and Springfield. She received the Volunteer of the Year Award from Girls Inc., Holyoke. Packard's work is supported by the National Science Foundation's CAREER program. In June 2005, she went to the White House to receive the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government upon early career scientists. Packard's numerous scholarly articles have been published in such journals as *Career Development Quarterly*, *Mentoring and Tutoring*, *Journal of Career Development*, *Journal of College Science Teaching*, *Advancing Women in Leadership*, and *Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy*.

Jack Donovan Foley was the developer of many sound effect techniques used in film making. He worked on the pictures such as *Melody of Love*, *Show Boat* (1929), *Dat Ol' Ribber*, *Spartacus*, and *Pink Submarine*. He is attributed with inventing the art of Foley, which is the process of adding sound effects such as footsteps and environmental sounds to films. His crucial founding role in the development of Foley is documented in the 2009 book *The Foley Grail*.

Jeanne Guillemin is professor of Sociology at Boston College and a senior fellow at the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Dr. Camacho served as a sergeant with the 9th Marines in Vietnam (1969-1969) and was wounded in action. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Boston College in 1986 and his MSIS from Northeastern University in 1995. He served as the executive director of a two-year investigative legislative Commission in Massachusetts from 1982 through 1983 and authored the publication of Senate 1824 and Senate 2307 (1983), the interim and final reports of that Commission. That study included a broad range of research on a number of issues, including health care for the underserved veterans' population. Dr. Camacho was one of several activists who played a role in the passage of the Veterans Entrepreneurship and Small Business Development Act of 1999. He has expertise in focus group and field research methods as well as a level of expertise in statistics and questionnaire design. He has been a practicing social scientist for well over twenty years. He teaches a wide range of social science courses as an adjunct faculty at a number of universities in the Boston area. He has several published articles on the military in Vietnam and the status of Vietnam veterans in various books and journals, and is a member of the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society.

Kevin Eggan became NYSCF's Chief Scientific Officer in 2006 and is a founding member of NYSCF's Medical Advisory Board. He is Assistant Professor of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology at Harvard University and a Principal Investigator of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. Dr. Eggan is also an Assistant Investigator of the Stowers Medical Institute and a MacArthur Fellow. In 2008, he received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from President Bush. He is a 2006 MacArthur Fellow. After receiving his PhD in Biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Dr. Eggan went to Harvard University as a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows.

A high school teacher during the 1960's and early 1970's, Myron ("Mike") Arms abandoned the formal classroom in 1977 in favor of a different kind of educational setting: a 60-foot traditional wooden schooner called Dawn Treader. As founder and director of a program of "sea learning" experiences and as a Coast Guard licensed Ocean Master, he sailed for the next five years with hundreds of teenage boys and girls. "The curriculum was life," says Arms of his program. "The teacher was the sea. I learned as much as my students. We measured the sea's chemistry, sampled its bottom sediments, studied its microscopic populations with a plankton net and microscope. It was the beginning, really, of my own emerging awareness of the stresses being suffered by virtually all of the world's marine environments."

Director and co-founder Amanda Vincent holds the Canada Research Chair in Marine Conservation at the University of British Columbia's Fisheries Center. She has a PhD in marine biology from the University of Cambridge and was Darwin Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford from 1994 to 1996. She is considered the leading authority on seahorse biology and conservation, and in 2000 was named a Pew Fellow in Marine Conservation. She also serves as lead scientific advisor and chair of the seahorse working group for CITES.